In a recent interview with Kirk Strang, we talked about the do’s and don’ts of parental involvement in schools.
In Part 1, Kirk’s focus was on parents as constituents & electorate. In this installment, he talks about parents as groups.
We hope this information proves helpful to school administrators, as well as school boards, as they work with children and their families on a day-to-day basis.
Here’s what Kirk had to say about parents as groups …
In addition to parents as constituents and electorate, there are also parents as groups. And we've seen more of this recently, with parents assembling as groups and demanding that their school boards do certain things.
In the last three years or so, some of those things have included parents insisting that their children not be required to wear a mask during the pandemic. And we’d see these big assemblies, where parents would come to a school board meeting, and sometimes there'd be so many the board would have to put the meeting in the auditorium. And then you would have this mass of people who want to encourage the board to either not implement a mask requirement or rescind a requirement that they've already put in place. There were news stories on this, and at times the scene could get quite ugly. And the parents could be very determined.
Situations like this can sometimes lead to these determined points of view being extreme — and we still have to find a way to break bread with these folks.
It's kind of like the diplomats' credo … “talk to anybody,” because ultimately, the school board understands that everybody — no matter what they believe — is still part of their community, and deserves an audience. Maybe not the benefit of a favorable decision, but a chance to be heard.
Parent Groups & Books
Another example we've seen more recently of group parent mentality is parent groups and books. And this is one where we have been more firm, because I think we have to be more firm on this subject, as we’ve found ourselves in a different model here …
We've talked about working with parents and partnering with parents, but now we have groups of parents that come to school, or school board meetings, with a list of books that appear on the shelves of our library, or at least a report that they do. And they have passages from the book to quote for the proposition that, according to them, contain obscenity that sit on the shelves of our school library. And that ‘obscenity’ in their view needs to be purged.
Now, here’s how it’s a different “model.” In my almost four decade career practicing school law, I have seen this type of protest come up — very early in my career — in an entirely different way. That was before we had the internet, and before we had social media for these groups to organize through. Back then, it had to be a group of people who called each other up on the phone to organize. And you didn't see the kind of movements that you see today, which are fueled by social media, and by parents and other constituents’ participation in social media. And that is how these parents can get a bigger crowd.
When I dealt with this type of situation early in my career, the target was the Mark Twain novel Huckleberry Finn. The church group attending a school meeting found it offensive. There was also an effort to reach out to get other voters to say that the reference to ‘N’ word, Jim, was offensive to them, too. Kind of a pitch for us to think of this as discrimination.
But myself and the school administrators very politely, but very firmly, pointed out that Huckleberry Finn is widely regarded as one of the great American works. And, we're not taking Huckleberry Finn off the shelf. We’re also not taking something that they didn't see, but that's far more volatile, Mark Twain's, Letters from the Earth. And apparently, this group wasn't familiar with letters from the earth, but it happened to be in that library, and it’s a far more controversial piece by Twain.
In comparison, today’s book banning groups are far more organized. They have groups, usually think tanks in Washington, that have this agenda and then they basically distribute all the buzzwords and talking points — so now there are a lot of books under attack.
A lot of the books that are under attack are not classics. They tend to be kind of coming of age novels for people who are in their late teens. And of course, coming of age novels for late teens, usually, in the right kind of novel are going to have some sort of romantic expression. And, that is what we see targeted a little more now.
I think they're sage in that they're being careful not to pick on Shakespeare or other well-known authors because they know it will be too easy for the board to dismiss them. But it's become a real problem.
And school boards, under Chapter 120.12 — those are what we itemize as the school board duties, not to be confused legally with school board powers, which appear at Chapter 120.13. But school board duties appear at 120.12. And people will say things like, “well you've got a duty to know what's in your curriculum, you have a duty to promulgate a curriculum, and so we think you should know what you're approving and you need to know that you approved all the smut.”
Well, it does put schools at a disadvantage because school boards do, in fact, have a statutory duty to prescribe curriculum. But the way it's prescribed in the modern days is, school board members don't start reading every book in the library. Instead, there are recognized services that work with school districts to determine age appropriateness for various pieces of work. Those reviewers are then part of the service — so you have reviewers as part of services that you select things from. But those selections have been reviewed for content and so forth. And then, if there are things that are close to the line, then somebody within the district may take a look at the book and get more familiar with it. But the people who will do more of the reading and getting familiar with it will be in the department where the book is being used.
For example, the department head of the English department will certainly know about different books that are being approved, because you don't just decide what does and does not have potentially inappropriate content in it, you decide what's worth reading — and what's important for the kids to read. And then, of course, those are the books you're going to have more knowledge of, as opposed to everything on the shelf in the library.
So when we have these disputes, we typically have two types that take on very different dimensions ... One will be, “you have smut in the library,” another will be, “you have smut in a class, my kid had to read this book …”
It’s worth mentioning, any student whose parents or caregivers do not feel that a particular book is appropriate will be given an alternative book to read. And most schools give advance notice to people like parents to let them know that they need to understand that if any of them do not want their child to participate in the human growth and development curriculum — sex education — they can opt them out. And if there is a novel or book that they find offensive for religious or other reasons, they can opt out.
We don't require anyone to read any particular thing. So, parent complaints sometimes are a bit askew, because they didn't do their diligence as parents and read the syllabus, or at the very least failed to let us know in advance that they didn’t want their child to read a particular book. So a lot of times they haven't done their homework. But we have to work with those parents, and they can be far more personal because you'll have a parent there at a meeting who's in front of the school board reading passages from the book while trying to suggest that the book — as a whole — is problematic because of those isolated passages.
It's very delicate at times. Respectfully letting them know that the book has been reviewed, and that's why it's there, and that they can always opt out if they so choose is an important step we have to take. Another step is letting the parent know they had a chance to opt out, and making sure they are aware of the process of how to do so going forward.
Sometimes you can broker an agreement by saying, “look, let's not have you or your child feel this way, let's look at a different book and let's have your child's grade be based on that.” We often have to be flexible in these situations, just to show parents that we're responsive to their concerns and that we're not trying to force any particular thing on them or their family. We're trying to make sure that things that are at a certain educational level for an 11th grader, for example, will continue to challenge the student's reading, vocabulary, and intellectual development. And that's what we're going for, in particular in those later years. That's our mission. That's why I do what I do.
What we want is capable, independent thinking, functioning adults — we want to graduate students that are capable of transitioning from being students into being citizens and behaving like citizens. And, that mission of trying to make sure that we give every child a chance — down to the kindergarten level — so by the time they leave the 12th grade, they may not have come from means, but maybe they've got a scholarship now to Harvard or something because they took advantage of the services we offer. And now their life is on a completely different trajectory than perhaps that of the child’s prior generation in their family.
That's what we work for. That’s a treasure to us. That said, like a lot of people who work in a bigger system, we don't always see the fruits of our labor quite the way an artisan would. And at the same time, when we get together, when I talk with other superintendents and school board members — you're not going to meet a more kid-centered group. They may not all be, I've dealt with administrators that parents were frustrated with. And at the same time I've never found somebody who works in our field where their heart is in the wrong place. And that really is why we do what we do. At the end of the day, we want these kids to be graduating and ready for the real world.
That brings us to the close of Part 2 of our series. In Part 3, Kirk dives into a discussion on different ways a school board can turn a situation with a more troublesome or cantankerous parent or group into something more productive.